TeX/LaTeX Materials for Students and Others

"Don Knuth's Tau Epsilon Chi (TeX) is potentially the most significant
invention in typesetting in this century. It introduces a standard language
in computer typography, and in terms of importance, could rank near the
introduction of the Gutenberg press."
--Gordon Bell, forward to Tex and metafont, New Directions in Typesetting

LaTeX is composed of two main systems: TeX and a macro package that
sits on top of it called LaTeX. In this article, I will use LaTeX
to refer to the entire system.

TeX (pronounced Tech) was written by Donald Knuth in the late 1970s.
If you are not familiar with Donald Knuth's work, stop now and check
out his web site.
Knuth is considered one of the pioneers of computer science and his
books have influenced generations of programmers and computer scientists.
TeX came to life because of Knuth's frustration with the quality of
typesetting for his books.

As Knuth writes in the foreword of The TeX book, "TeX is a new typesetting
system intended for the creation of beautiful books--and especially
for books that contain a lot of mathematics. By preparing a manuscript
in TeX format, you will be telling a computer exactly how the manuscript
is to be transformed into pages whose typographic quality is comparable
to that of the world's finest printers."

The TeX software is basically a macro processor, with an accompanying
macro package called Plain TeX. TeX is exceedingly stable. In fact,
Donald Knuth offers a reward if you're the first person to report a
new error.

LaTeX (pronounced Lah-tech) is a macro package written by Leslie Lamport.
This macro package uses the typesetting functionality of TeX, but adds
high-level abstractions that simplify the creation of documents. According
to the TeX FAQ,
"LaTeX allows markup to describe the structure of a document, so that
the user need not think about presentation. By using document classes
and add-on packages, the same document can be produced in a variety
of different layouts."

To sum up, TeX provides typesetting facilities, and LaTeX provides the high-level
macros that make TeX easier to use, and it simplifies the creation and
production of documents.

To use LaTeX, you first compose a LaTeX source file. A LaTeX source
file is a text file with a .tex extension, which consists of your writing
content and LaTeX control sequences. Next, you pass the document
to the LaTeX system, where it reads the document, processes the file, or
files, and produces its output files. In practice, the process is more
complex.

The primary strength of LaTeX is its typesetting quality. It effectively
enforces a consistent and professional layout and typographical convention
for your document. As such, it provides structure to your document and
makes it far more professional and readable. Additionally, it relieves
you from thinking about the visual aspects (form) of the document and
making ad hoc decisions concerning the document's appearance. This enables
you to think about the substance of your writing and let LaTeX worry
about the form of the document, and it allows you to produce the highest quality
output.

Another nice feature of LaTeX is that it renders your source document
in many output formats. For example, imagine writing your resume in
LaTeX and producing a PDF, Postscript, HTML, and RTF version--all
from a single source file and rendered in the highest quality output.

LaTeX
is a document preparation system ideally suited for writing technical
papers, books, and other documentation. Many journals accept LaTeX files
at the final submission stage, greatly reducing the number of typographical
errors that might otherwise appear in published works.

A number of freely-available versions of LaTeX exist for various platforms.
If you are using LINUX, you probably already have LaTeX on your system.
Otherwise, look here to find
a distribution for your system.

BibTeX is a tool and file format used to
describe and process lists of references in conjunction with LaTeX. This
offers several advantages:

citation information for an article, chapter, book, etc. need only be
type once, in a BibTeX database, which can be used forever;

once citation information has been entered into a BibTeX database,
references in a document can be generated by referring to a simple
keyword that maps the citation information in the database to the
appropriate point in the document;

by using BibTeX style files, it is easy to change citation styles
in a document;

many journals have their own style files;

in the case of journals that do not maintain their own style file,
software exists to generate new style files.

An easy way to learn LaTeX is by example.
Here
is the LaTeX file that I used to produce one of my recent papers;
here
is the PDF file with the paper.
Note that in line 35 of the LaTeX file, I load a style file,
pww.sty, that contains a number of commands
or macros that I have defined.
In addition, I used BibTeX to handle citations.
Click
here to see an example of a BibTeX
database.